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Music in Me...I checked out your recording earlier today..makes mine seem utterly, well, aaarrrghhh. I like the way you made use of the arpeggios (is that right?). It's certainly not in the book so I'm assuming you've added that. Sounds good. I'm going to try that.

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Behind every successful woman is some twit who's lost the remote....

Check out some of those (free) web applications for developing sight reading... It takes time to recognize notes quickly on the staff. I still don't do it well, especially with high and low octave notes. A trick is to read by intervals instead of note by note. So, if you see A above middle C (which sits on a space), followed by another note on a space, you know that note has got to be a C, since it's a third apart from A. I'm trying that myself and find that it helps, so does reading chord names and automatically hitting the right notes,etc.

Having spent most of July (and the first part of August) working on my ABF Recital piece, I am now returning my attention to neglected assignments in Alfred's Book 2. This evening, I have a lesson in which I play Solace, La Raspa, For He;s a Jolly Good Fellow, Mexican Hat Dance, and Tarantella for my teacher. If I get a blessing on my level of polish on these, we will resume with Festive Dance next week.

Either way, I think my original goal of completing Alfred's Book 2 by EOY is out of the question at this point, but I do hope to finish it before next summer.

Angelas, thanks for the quote there... I always wondered what that guy said. He's pretty clear before and after your quoted sentence, but I've always had a hard time parsing what said in the middle. And until now, it never occurred to me to look it up.

"It's only a difference of opinion, really... good manners don't cost nothin', ey?"

I stick to the tempo on the CD until I call it done, then play it anyway I like. This particular piece is moderate in speed (I don't think it's more than 100 quarter note beats per minute, but I'm just guessing now).

A great job on both of those pieces! La Raspa was a tricky thing to count, due to the various rests between notes throughout, but you certainly mastered that nicely. I think Mexican Hat Dance is next (or coming up). It's another well known song.

1) Look at the piece key, structure, types of chords, rests, ties, etc.2) Listen to it a few times even if you're familiar with it.3) Using your index finger for pointing to the notes on the sheet, count treble clef and base clef separately. Your finger touches the sheet on beats only, and stays on the sheet when it's a tie, etc. Then count with same finger both clefs (as practically possible).4) Play right hand, then left hand.5) Put them together and hope for the best.

Even though La Bamba is already taking over a week, I did La Raspa and Jolly Fellow in a day each, so this method does have some merit, and I'm sure any shortcoming is my fault not the method's!

P.S. I have never heard anyone mention using the index finger with counting, so if there's any chance of getting a patent on it, I'd go for it.... The MiM Index Finger Counting Method.

I should clarify that La Raspa and For He's a Jolly Good Fellow were two pieces I've seen before, not completely new... otherwise it would've taken me more than a day to record for sure. New ones for me were Solace and Alexander's Rag Time Band, and those took me about 10 days each, just for the record!

Interestingly enough, I have never attempted to change the prescribed fingering, thinking that it would be a mistake to do so. In the last two pieces I worked on, though, the ones I finished in a day each having tried them years before, I remember clearly struggling with some passages, and then see a sudden improvement once I changed the fingering to something that suited me. Is this change of fingering something you often do? How does everyone feel about that?

I do have a history of being creative when it comes to fingerings. In the case of Mexican Hat Dance, I found I had to abide pretty closely to the suggestions, otherwise I would get hopelessly lost. I tried, and tried to get a version of this that I considered to be truly Allegro, but just couldn't do it. (More on this on my latest blog entry, but really, all I did was take two long paragraphs to say "can't play it fast".)

This something I am trying to play close attention to... thusfar in my piano playing, I haven't played many (any?) fast pieces, but many of the complicated piece that most interest me, things I hope to play in 5 or 10 years, require fast runs.

At any rate, this will do. And now I am going to fight the same dragon with the Tarantella.

Good job, AWPP... I think you got most of the speed in there. My CD's version is just a tad bit faster but not by much. I've already spent a day on this, and I still feel this will take a few days easily.

If there are any pieces from any Alfred book you want posted on the opening page, post it here and drop me a PM. Some stuff gets lost in the conversation and I don't always read through every post of every thread.

AWtPP, I'm still on Mexican Hat Dance, trying to speed it up a little more. How did you find hitting the first F# with your left pinky starting on line 4? It seems a little hard when you are going fast to get the small finger to fall on the key without slipping. Any trick that worked for you?

Hi, MiM. I eye-checked that part. Meaning, I kept an eye on what my LH was doing, while my RH was on auto-pilot. For me, this particular passage was not difficult. The biggest difficulty I had was in the measure directly above the one you refer to, where I had to move my LH ring finger down to a low G. I had a miserable time with this. That and the last measure, where the hands are moving quickly in opposite directions. Oh, and I had quite a bit of trouble doing the 1-2 thing, where the footnote says to "Play the F and G together with the side of the thumb." To me that was much harder than just reaching for the notes.

I had to play Mexican Hat Dance more than most other pieces so far, so a lot of repetition is really the only trick that worked for me.

All that said, here is the Tarantella. All 20 seconds of it. I'd have skipped it entirely, but our 3 year old seems to like to dance to it.